Who were las románticas? The first generation of Spanish women to conceive of themselves as "writing women," they made their appearance in the press around 1841. It was the apogee of Spain's Romantic movement and of a first wave of liberal reforms, and these women gave voice to their experience as women within the terms of liberal Romantic ideology. Susan Kirkpatrick examines the textual representations that link liberal ideology, Romantic configurations of subjectivity, and women's writing, in an exciting revelation of early nineteenth-century gender consciousness.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989. "She shows us things we have not seen before. . . . This is a sophisticated, elegant, and important text. It demonstrates clearly, and for the first time, how women helped to shape Spanish Romantic discourse--both as subject and as object--and how prevailing attitudes shaped their writings."--David T. Gies, University of Virginia

"A deep and genuine analysis of the women writers who are the objects of each chapter, utilizing the most modern methods of literary criticism . . . this book will be viewed as essential not only by scholars of women in literature but also for specialists dealing with the nineteenth century."--Gregorio C. Martin, Duquesne University